What Claude Remembers About You (And How To Edit It)
Memory sounds spooky until you realise you can read it, correct it and bin it. Four moves, plus the spring-clean prompt.
Your supermarket loyalty card knows what time you shop, what you buy when you’re stressed, and roughly when your washing machine broke. It has never once shown you the file.
Claude’s memory is the opposite arrangement. It’s a notebook, you can read it, and you hold the pen. Four moves and you own it: read it, correct it, bin it, feed it.
First, what it actually is. Short notes on the useful things you’ve told Claude: what you do, what you’re working on, how you like answers. Notes, not recordings. It’s on by default for most accounts, so there’s probably a page of it already. Find it in Settings, then the memory option, where there’s a link to view and edit what it remembers.
1. Read it
Open a chat and type: “What do you remember about me? List all of it.”
That’s the whole mechanism. No hidden file to hunt down. You can also open the memory list in the settings, where entries appear one by one and can be edited or deleted individually.
Do this before you decide how you feel about memory. Almost everyone imagines something more sinister than what turns up, which is usually fifteen lines like “runs a dog-grooming round, prefers short answers, raised prices in June”. More Post-it note than dossier.
2. Correct it
In plain sentences, in any chat:
- “Update your memory, I’ve moved from Leeds to Sheffield.”
- “You’ve got my day rate wrong, it’s £320 now.”
- “Stop noting that I’m new to this, I’d like normal-speed answers.”
Say you told Claude all about your cake business in March, then moved to bookkeeping over the summer. Without a correction, October’s chats keep gently steering back to buttercream. One sentence fixes it, and every future conversation starts in the right place.
Stale notes are behind most “Claude’s gone weird lately” complaints. It’s working faithfully from old information about a life you no longer live.
3. Bin it
Three sizes, smallest first.
- One thing: “Forget what I told you about that client dispute.”
- A proper clear-out: the spring-clean prompt below, or delete entries one at a time in the settings list.
- The lot: switch memory off in the same settings, and Claude goes back to treating every conversation as a first introduction. Reversible whenever.
For a one-off you’d rather leave no trace, start a temporary chat instead of turning anything off.
The thing people constantly blur: memory and model training are two separate settings. Memory is Claude’s notebook, for your benefit, in your conversations. Whether your chats help improve Claude is a different toggle in Settings → Privacy. Wanting to be remembered doesn’t oblige you to share anything.
4. Feed it
This is the move that turns memory from mildly useful into the reason Claude starts feeling like it gets you. When a conversation lands somewhere, say so:
- “Remember this decision: my day rate is £320 and I’ve stopped discounting for friends of friends.”
- “Remember: emails get signed off Cheers, Priya. Never Kind regards.”
- “Remember we picked the blue branding and stop offering alternatives.”
Left alone, memory collects biography. The gold is rulings: prices you’ve settled, tones you’ve chosen, boundaries you’ve drawn, options you’ve closed. Feed it decisions and Claude stops reopening things you sorted weeks ago.
The spring-clean
Every couple of months, or whenever something shifts. Ten minutes, oddly satisfying, like clearing a drawer.
Nick this one:
You're helping me spring-clean what you remember about me, because out-of-date notes are worse than no notes.
1. List everything you currently remember about me, grouped under: who I am, my work, how I like answers, ongoing projects, and anything else.
2. Mark anything that looks out of date, too vague to be useful, or that you're not confident about.
3. Take me through the marked items one at a time and ask: keep, update, or forget? Wait for my answer each time before moving on.
4. Tell me what's worth remembering about me that ISN'T in there yet, based on what we've talked about.
5. Finish with the two or three sentences I should paste back to you today, written as instructions starting "Remember:".
Rules: keep your side short, one item at a time, no summarising my life back at me in paragraphs. Ask me up to three questions before you start if anything in the list is unclear.Number 4 earns its keep. It regularly digs out a decision you made mid-chat weeks ago that never got filed anywhere.
Where this stops
- Notes, not transcripts. Claude won’t quote you back from six weeks ago out of memory. That’s what searching your old chats is for, and the two work as a pair: notebook for the gist, search for the receipts.
- Work inside a project stays in that project. A project keeps its own memory, separate from your ordinary chats, which is handy and occasionally surprising.
- It can’t remember what you never said. Sparse chats, sparse notebook. That’s the system working.
Today
One line, right now: “What do you remember about me?”
Whatever you currently feel about AI remembering things, five minutes from now that feeling will be based on the actual contents of the actual notebook, and you’ll know how to change anything you don’t like.
One thing memory should never hold is passwords, bank details or other people’s private business: Never Paste These Into AI has the line.
That’s the notebook sorted. The Claude Kickstart is the whole setup done properly: Claude taught your actual work, five real jobs handed over, and a playbook for your trade. £47, one weekend.